*Noone has to see this mess.*

Taehyung was busy performing an incision on his wrist. 

He was in a hospital corridor, seated in a wheelchair where he didn’t belong, and had even managed to dislocate a small but sharp component of the wheelchair with which he was using to cut his wrist.

The level of concentration with which he was doing this was so high that he didn’t hear footsteps picking up their pace towards him. 

A doctor had spotted Taehyung from the opposite end of the corridor, and his footsteps quickened when he affirmed on sight that Taehyung definitely had intentions of hurting himself.

“Hey- What you doing-“

The doctor pulled Taehyung’s right arm above his shoulder, as he went down on a bended knee to check on the bright red incision freshly carved out on the guy’s left wrist.

“Oh hey, I have a visitor.” Taehyung smiled with pleasure.

The doctor glanced at Taehyung briefly with a stern expression, but wasted no time in tying a handkerchief tightly around the bleeding wrist. 

“My my, aren’t you fast.” Taehyung commented, but while the doctor was busy tending to his left wrist, he had bitten the makeshift razor between his teeth and managed to cut his right wrist open as well.

The doctor stared dumbfounded at the 2 freshly slit wrists before him for a few moments.

Taehyung offered his overturned wrists to the doctor like he was asking for an arrest, with a smirk on his face that read “What can you do with me?”

“Oh, come on now.” The doctor was now fired up by Taehyung’s antagonist behaviour, and got up to extract the razor from between Taehyung’s teeth. In the midst of a slight struggle from the crazy patient’s end, the edge of the razor bore down into the doctor’s fingertips and drew a bit of red.

The doctor dropped the razor with a hiss, and instinctively backed away from Taehyung though he wasn’t too concerned about a ladybug-sized droplet of blood forming on his finger. It was more of Taehyung’s behaviour that offended him. 

“Do you not want my help?” The doctor muttered in disbelief, as this was the first time he had met a patient with this level of defiance.

“Doctor Park Jimin.” Taehyung read the doctor’s nametag aloud with a whimsical note.

Jimin had started to wrap layers of bandage around Taehyung’s other wrist as well. 

When that was done, Jimin did a surprise move on Taehyung by taking off his doctor’s coat and restraining Taehyung’s arms with it. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” Taehyung calmly allowed his two wrists to be lifted and secured over the front of his chest, with the coat which Jimin looped over the back of the wheelchair, like a straightjacket.

“Now let’s get you to someone who can actually help you. Elevating the arms can only do so much for the moment.” Jimin gathered up the razor from the floor, and started to push Taehyung in the wheelchair towards the A&E ward.

“What kind of help do you think I need? Like, we’re talking BIG help?”

Taehyung sounded like he had just unlocked an achievement, and turned his head to flash Jimin a toothy smile.

Jimin just looked at Taehyung speechlessly. That seemed like a rhetorical question to him. This guy needed help BIG time.

Jimin kept his opinions to himself however, and they soon arrived at the A&E after an interval of silence. Taehyung’s head got droopy, and he looked like he was drifting off to sleep with his eyes glazed over. 

“야 Ya.” Jimin cupped Taehyung’s cheek in one hand and heightened it to focus his attention. “Stay with me. Don’t drift off.”

Taehyung caught Jimin’s well-intentioned steady gaze, but the searing pain on his wrists was kicking in, and it made him squirm and want to throw off his senses in total abandonment.

Taehyung cocked his chin away from Jimin’s hand, and cast his shadowy eyes sideways to avoid looking at his blood-streaked arms raised before him. 

“No matter what happens, please don’t do this to yourself ever again.” 

Jimin’s voice travelled to Taehyung’s ears through a fog of half-consciousness.

Taehyung’s eyes flickered up to see a trickle of blood had s its way around Jimin’s pricked finger from earlier, but Jimin was only concerned that the A&E nurse should get this wheelchair patient some immediate help. 

Taehyung saw through his foggy consciousness that the nurse was making a phone call upon Jimin’s alert for her to take over, and at the end of the call she hastened towards Taehyung with a thick blanket, while Jimin hovered at the nurse station.

“Why do you care…” Taehyung spoke up so that Jimin would hear. 

The nurse lay the thick blanket over Taehyung, and started to wheel him off, past where Jimin was standing.

“What if I told you I have AIDS?” 

Taehyung muttered under his breath, when he was close enough to be sure that Jimin would hear it in passing.

Taehyung’s words reverberated in Jimin’s mind like a heartbeat that had been magnified to echo through his entire body. 

The shock of hearing that made Jimin’s world stand still for a moment, while Taehyung still found the nerve to continue passing by with his eyes trained on Jimin for observation.

A beat later, “You’re a fool, aren’t you. To take me for real.”

Taehyung chuckled with however little amusement his drained self could manage, and then let his curtain-like fringe fall and obscure his eyes.

“Goodbye, Doctor Park. It was nice meeting you.”

Taehyung’s parting words and slouchy back view struck Jimin as strange. 

Surely these would not be the words spoken by a psychopath who intended to spread AIDS around the hospital?

Perhaps a downtrodden sociopath would come closer to Jimin’s impression of him. The self-harming sort would not take a sudden turn to inflict harm upon others, right? The turn of events just seemed too sudden, and Jimin was unable to process it for a while.

He couldn’t get Taehyung’s disinterested parting face out of his mind. It was a look that clammed up on everything, like the curtain-fall of his fringe had switched the act on stage and it was time to move on to the next play of events.

Either way, Jimin knew he had to get his health checked out right away. 

Until then, this self-persuasion that Taehyung meant no harm, was just an attempt on his part to allay his fears.

Jimin looked down upon his bloodied shirt sleeve that nestled the razor, and recalled the moment he had retrieved it from between Taehyung’s teeth. 

Taehyung had been adamant about not allowing Jimin to take the razor away from him, yet Jimin sensed that Taehyung released the grip of his teeth the moment the razor nipped his fingertip as though he had no wish for further escalation. 

Taehyung suspended his stubborn struggle, otherwise the razor would have cut Jimin’s finger more deeply, and Jimin also observed the aggressive look in Taehyung’s eyes soften visibly after that. 

Taehyung just gave his arms up to Jimin after that.

In any case, Jimin believed he can differentiate the truth from lies. 

For his sake, he hoped that the flicker of fire in Taehyung’s eyes had been fanned by momentary impulses instead of a destructive calling.